This brings the design into line with Live Brum. It’s probably broken in all sorts of horrible ways right now but I’m working on it and everything should come right in a day or three.

Please bear with me.

It is with genuine delight that I can announce that Events.OnTheWight.com is now live.

Managed entirely independently by Simon and Sal, the fine people behind Ventnor Blog, the site is based on the same code that powers Live Brum and Live Worcs.

How did it come about

Well, at some point in the last few months I had a brief chat with Will Perrin of Talk About Local where (as it so often does with me) Live Brum came up in the conversation.

At some point after that, Will found himself at a conference in Stoke chatting to Simon and Sal from the Ventnor Blog. They were having problems finding good ways to display event data for the Isle of Wight.

Will mentioned me to them. They emailed me and, I’m not exaggerating here, two weeks later Events on The Wight sprung into life.

Why does this make me so incredibly happy?

I go back a long way with the Isle of Wight. My great aunt Sybil lived in Bonchurch, right next door to Ventnor throughout my childhood and I spent pretty much every summer there when I was growing up. It’s a magical place, only enhanced by my skewed childhood memories which are always of blue sky and glorious sunshine.

The summers I spent in Bonchurch were some of the most joyful times of my life. So much so that I’ve been back twice this year to relive old memories. On both occasions the sun shone brightly, enhancing those childhood memories and adding to the magic. Behold some 2009 photos.

Bonchurch sea front. Ventnor is just round the corner, about five minutes walk.

Bonchurch village.

Bonchurch Pond

So when, by complete chance, I got an email about doing an event listings site for the Island I jumped at the chance. It’s been thrilling to see the code beginning to power sites in other areas and Simon and Sal are the best possible people to be running it in the Isle of Wight.

Early feedback

The response to the launch has been tremendous. The Ventnor Blog announcement post generated some wonderful comments. I’ve copied a random selection below but it really is worth reading them all.

“I must say this is a brilliant idea – a one stop portal is a real asset, you despair of other offerings.”

“Fantastic. A much needed resources. Looks good, feels good, what’s not to like. Good luck with it.”

“lovin it VB! great stuff and another step forward in ruling the media-waves with community driven content.”

“Brilliant…..Sheer brilliance….Another wonderful asset for the Island community…It’s the way ahead. ”

Finally, news came a coupe of days ago that the site has been shortlisted for Hampshire Web Awards in the ‘Pride of Place’ category.

Exciting times.

Want a version for you area?

Well get in touch and let’s talk.

Covering events of all types throughout the City of Worcester and maintained entirely independently from Live Brum, Live Worcs is the first listings site in the world outside Birmingham to use the Live Brum codebase!

There’s a blog too and you can find them on Twitter under the name @liveworcester

Talking of Twitter, there was a nice endorsement from Worcester City Council.

As ever you can find events by Date, Genre, Venue or Keyword Search with RSS feeds throughout.

Another good logo

Yep, we have Claire Hartley to thank for that. Starting with a brief that simply said ‘anything but a cathedral spire’ Claire came up with an original, iconic, design that seems to perfectly suit both the City and the website. Thanks Claire.

I love it – it’s bright, cheerful, dynamic. It radiates energy and vibrancy which seems like a good way to represent this fine City. However, I’ve yet to meet anyone in person that can guess it’s distinctly Birmingham origins. It’s been fun letting people in on the ’secret’ individually but it’s time to go public with the big reveal.

However, looking at the comments on my previous post it seems that lot’s of people can easily guess with no wrong answers so far! Perhaps it’s not a oblique as I imagined.

Ponder it one more time. Can you guess it’s inspiration? Scroll down and all will be revealed.

It’s the Gravelly Hill Interchange, more commonly known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’.

So now you know.

Live Brum originally launched with a home-grown design (which you can still see here). It worked and seemed to be popular but it also lacked a certain something. This design wasn’t intended to be anything special – just my attempt at presenting the information in the cleanest way possible. Anyway, I wasn’t satisfied.

Enter Simon Clayson based at the legendary former RAF base at Rissington. Following a quick meeting Simon quickly came up with a raft of great ideas which we gradually distilled down to what you see before you today. There’s also a Flickr set showing old and new side by side. Simon did a terrific job and was an absolute pleasure to work with.

This new design went live a few months ago now and has had universally positive feedback. This design also made it much easier to launch new variations and that was an important priority for me. Future posts will show why.

What about the logo?

I wanted Live Brum to have a logo. Days before the original site launch in May 2008, Sam Rayner knocked me up a few ideas. In the end, mostly due to time pressures, I launched without anything of note. However, one of Sam’s ideas in particular really stuck with me and, in the end, we ended up using it on the re-design.

Those colourful criss-crossing lines may not appear to mean much but they have a distinctly Birmingham flavour. I’ve asked around and, to date, I’ve not met anyone that worked out their inspiration. Can you? I promise I’ll reveal all in the next few days.

Since the launch of Art Brum and Digital Brum things have gone a bit quiet round here. Sorry about that.

However, despite the silence, Live Brum and family continue to thrive. Developments have been happening in the background and it’s time to start telling you about them. Overdue actually but real life has been particularly real recently so I’m running behind.

Bear with me, there will be posts.

It works much like Live Brum but for art and exhibitions around the City. You can see what’s on today, or browse by venue or date. There’s RSS feeds everywhere so you can subscribe to all events, events at a particular venue, even a feed of results for a particular search term.

As ever, it’s not finished. Still to come is a list of permanent and semi-permanent exhibitions which we’ll display alongside the main listings in some places. Some of the current listings such as Dürer to Spencer may get demoted to this area as I redefine them as semi-permanent. It’s all about trying to find a balance between showing everything that’s on and not having some of the exciting, short run events get drowned out. We’re going to keep experimenting with this over the coming weeks. Let us know if you have any strong feelings or brilliant ideas!

If you know about an Art related event happening in Birmingham that isn’t in then please let us know and we’ll add it immediately. Even better, you could even do it yourself. Again, just get in touch and we’ll sort you out with an account that allows you to add and edit data directly.

Finally, for those of you who like both art and live performance, there is now a site that shows you every event we’ve got. All Brum is also now live and shows everything from Live Brum, Art Brum and Digital Brum all in one big set of listings.

Enjoy.

Digital Brum will provide listings for all things web related. So, Bloggers Meets, LovalGovCamp, Hack Sessions, Social Media Surgeries, stuff like that.

Although burbling around as an idea for a while, inspiration to get on with it came from this post by Jon Bounds on the Paradise Circus Forum.

If you have an event that you think should be on then let us know. If you would prefer to add the data yourself then you need to create a new account and then send an email to info@livebrum.co.uk requesting editing rights.

All feedback appreciated.

The site is making really good progress but now we need your help.

What’s missing?

Have a browse around our pre-launch site and tell us what we’ve missed. Check the list of venues in particular. If you know of a venue or art event of any kind that you think should be on the site but isn’t then please let us know.

Criteria for entry

We use a fairly relaxed definition of what counts as Birmingham. If a venue has either a Bxx postcode or an 0121 telephone prefix then it counts for us. So, you may think that The Public is really beyond our boundary but with a postcode of B70 7PG and a phone number of 0121 533 7161 it actually qualifies on two counts.

We’re doing some final testing right now before announcing it on the site itself and writing a few notes to help new users but if you’d like to help us iron out any remaining kinks then get in touch and we’ll get you set up almost immediately.